Rodrigo Condori is 10 years old and is excited.
This little Argentine football fanatic is looking forward to the 2022 World Cup which takes place in Qatar and starts in November.
Meanwhile, he collects the stickers from the album that is sold by the Panini company, a tradition that takes place every four months before the tournament starts.
“All my classmates are collecting stickers and we exchange the repeated ones at school,” he told BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish service.
Rodrigo doesn’t know exactly how many stickers he has, but he says there are more than 260. To complete the album this year, 670 are needed.
The problem is that in Argentina it is difficult to find the stickers. His father Abraham says it’s a near impossible mission.
“We stood in line for three hours with a friend and bought 100 packages. Now there are no more,” he says.
The lack of stickers in Argentina even motivated a protest at the end of August in front of the offices of the official Panini distributor and inflated prices in parallel markets. This has been happening in several Latin American countries.
The album’s history
The Panini group, founded in 1961, based in Modena, Italy, is the official manufacturer of the Copa album.
The company is a reference in the market for figurines —especially for children— in Europe and Latin America and has branches and official distributors in various parts of the world.
Since 1970, the company has manufactured the album where collectors can paste the 49 x 65 mm figurines of athletes from the 32 teams participating in the tournament, in addition to the stadiums, the cup, the mascot and the official ball.
The packs come with 5 units to complete the 80 pages of the album.
BBC News Mundo requested sales figures from the company to have a dimension of the impact of the business, but received no response.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it’
Interest in completing the World Cup album varies across countries in the region.
“As Colombia did not qualify for the World Cup, so the fever is less,” says Colombian BBC Mundo journalist Alejandro Millán.
Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Mexico and Costa Rica are the Latin American countries that will compete in the World Cup in Qatar 2022.
In some streets and fairs, mainly in Montevideo, improvised tents are set up for repeated exchanges, and during school breaks the subject attracts attention.
There are even parents who exchange stickers at work on behalf of their children. A Uruguayan created an application to facilitate the exchange of stickers.
In Brazil, the São Paulo Procon last week asked the local Panini for information on the distribution of albums and stickers after receiving 432 complaints about lack of products.
Among other things, the company was consulted about the volume of material sold, prices and distribution deadlines, as well as responses to complaints about lack or delay in delivery.
Panini, which has until Friday (9) to respond to the entity for consumer rights, told TV Globo that the size of Brazil presents logistical challenges. The company says it has expanded online sales and retail deals.
But perhaps the most striking case took place in Buenos Aires.
“What happens in this World Cup I didn’t see in Russia, Germany, or the United States”, says Claudio Páez, who has had a newsstand in the Almagro neighborhood for 30 years.
He says customers line up and packs and sticker albums sell out within hours.
“People are nervous, desperate,” he says.
The bank’s owner believes that the great interest is due to the fact that “the Argentine national team generates enthusiasm and there is hope. It is a people who love football a lot, and with the magic provided by Messi at 100%, everything exploded”.
But he recognizes that “it is difficult to understand this phenomenon because people do not have enough to eat, we are living in a very bad economic situation”. Argentina faces a crisis that culminated in an annual inflation of 71% last July, the highest in 20 years.
In the tweet below, the vice president of the association of stall owners in Argentina asks Panini not to sell the stickers on other channels.
“Some buy the figurines in large quantities [e depois revendem]. So Panini created a monster,” says Páez.
The suggested price of a pack of stickers in Argentina is 150 pesos (approximately R$5.50, in the official price), but, with the shortage in the stands, the value reaches double or triple in parallel markets.
‘Very expensive’
It may be that unrest, shortages and even protests are a very Argentine characteristic. But the inflationary phenomenon of the nerds reaches several countries.
In Colombia, for example, the envelope went from about 2,000 Colombian pesos (about R$2.40) in the Russian Cup to 3,500 Colombian pesos (R$4.14) now, reports the newspaper El Espectador.
In Brazil, each package sells for R$4, double what it was four years ago. That raises the cost to complete the album, according to Bloomberg’s website, to R$3,865 — one and a half times the country’s average monthly income, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.
In 2018, a mathematician at Cardiff University in the UK calculated that it takes an average of 4,832 stickers to complete every page.
In Mexico the price of the stickers is 18 pesos (R$ 4.73). This represents 50% more than the figures for the World Cup in Russia in 2018.
In Argentina, sticker pack inflation approached 1,000% in just four years.
“I’m actually finishing it and it’s very expensive,” says Alejandro Millán, who lives in London.
In the UK, according to football finance expert Kieran Maguire, the official album can cost up to £883.80 to complete.
The analyst, interviewed by BBC Newsbeat journalist Manish Pandey, says the price of a package has risen from 20 pence many years ago to 90 pence now.
Why did prices go up? Kieran explains that “Panini has to pay a royalty amount to FIFA”.
“And they have to negotiate with individual football associations to obtain the rights to use the shirt and the shield. So it’s an expensive business for them,” he adds.
But he points out that it is tradition that keeps people with the hobby.
“There’s no better feeling than gluing the last sticker, especially if it happens before the tournament starts,” says the expert.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, Abraham Condori says that as a child, in Peru, he also collected figurines for the World Cup.
Now he relives the moment with Rodrigo and his other children, visiting the Buenos Aires stalls, afternoon after afternoon, in a kind of treasure hunt.
“For figurines, people can go crazy,” he says.
This text was published on the BBC News Brazil website.
I am Terrance Carlson, author at News Bulletin 247. I mostly cover technology news and I have been working in this field for a long time. I have a lot of experience and I am highly knowledgeable in this area. I am a very reliable source of information and I always make sure to provide accurate news to my readers.
